[DMCA-Activists] Draft GPLv3 bans DRM

[Seth Johnson]

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Subject: [A2k] Draft GPLv3 bans DRM


Irish Times Published:  20/01/2006

Free software movement faces down big business
Danny O'Brien

Wired on Friday: It's not often that the editing of a piece of
legal boilerplate 3,000 words long requires a grand unveiling at
a two-day conference, heated discussion across the globe and a
solemn declaration that nothing will be done with it for over a
year.

But then, the general public licence (GPL) version 3 is not just
any bit of legalese. It's the long-awaited sequel to one of the
key documents in the world of open-source or free software - an
ingenious bit of legalese akido that turned traditional copyright
on its head.

Every Linux-driven webserver you've ever visited (and, if you
wander the web at all, it will be quite a few) has a copy of it
buried somewhere on its drives. Much of the free software that
drives the internet is distributed according to its rules - and
more importantly, every piece of software derived from that
original software.

Rewriting it, as one law professor has said, is like hacking the
very constitution of the free software movement.

What the GPL does, and has done for over 16 years, is provide an
odd bargain on some software products.

If whoever owns the copyright to a piece of software decides to
place it under the GPL, the usual restrictions of copyright
vanish and the GPL lets anyone copy the work as much as they
like.

But there's a catch: if you make any modifications, you have to
make the changed work as free to distribute as the original, and
you have to agree to distribute a version of the software in a
form that makes it easy to modify, and hopefully improves it -
the "source code" of the program.

It's as though a group of bakers decided to offer, with every one
of their cakes, the recipe to make it, together with the
requirement that anyone who made a cake with their recipe should
pass on the secret to the person they sold their cakes to.

If that sounds like a political or ethical act rather than a
legal one, you'd be right. The GPL's author, Richard Stallman,
created the licence to combat the decline in knowledge-sharing
among programmers. It was a moral crusade for him.

However, over time, others argued, the evidence appeared to show
that free software, aside from its morality, had quality
advantages too.

Like the free exchange of ideas in academia, or peer review in
science, the  co-operation created by licences like the GPL
appeared to make for an industrial-quality and widely support
code.

And, by enforcing sharing, the GPL also carved itself a neatly
altruistic niche in the cut-throat commercial world. No
commercial company could hijack the code for its own use without
simultaneously revealing its additions to its competitors.

Despite a fair degree of mutters criticism by lawyers about its
vague drafting, the GPL has survived longer than most licences -
and has never been successfully challenged in court. But the
threats to Stallman's moral-free software movement have grown,
and the qualms of those who now build sizable businesses
supporting and improving open-source have never quite abated.

And so, after much discussion, Stallman's lawyer, Eben Moglen,
this month unveiled version 3 of the licence, the first update
since 1991.

Amazingly, in the powder-keg flammable world of lawyers,
political hotheads and armchair critics - which make up much of
the new world of open-source - they seem to have got away with
it.

That's not to say that the changes aren't major. If the new GPL
is adopted by individuals and companies, they'll be taking on two
extra parts of the free software crusade.

First, the new licence makes it clear that the open-source
software is not to be used in digital rights management (DRM)
systems, like that used by Sony BMG and Coldplay's publishers to
copy protect their CDs.

DRM is ethically at the opposite end of the spectrum to Stallman
and the free-software movement, preventing the users of software
from changing, improving or even re-distributing it.

More dangerously, DRM could be used to bypass the GPL's free
distribution requirements, so DRM and the GPL now part company.

The other additions are not quite so strongly stated. Many have
complained that the old GPL was inflexible, and ironically could
not itself be altered without making it incompatible with
differing versions. That has been fixed, by those explicitly
using the licence to alter it in clearly defined ways.

How those new variants propagate will be an interesting story in
itself. Moglen and Stallman now let software authors be a bit
more demanding in how they say future distributors of their
software make the original recipes available.

Google, for instance, does not offer copies of the free software
it uses because the original GPL only required that from
companies distributing programs, not using them.

Adopters of the new GPL can stipulate that a link be provided to
download the software used by a website.

And even stronger language is permitted to fight what the free
software advocates see as their most dastardly enemy - software
patents. No software is truly free if users can be sued by
strangers for the violated patents it might contain. The new GPL
lets users have some protection by stipulating that suing types
can't use the software themselves. And others can add clauses to
strengthen that retaliation by ganging up the threat with other
software makers.

The GPL was always a bargain between ethics and pragmatism. Now
that the pragmatists include multibillion dollar companies like
IBM and Novell, it'll be interesting to see if Moglen and
Stallman's additional scruples make the grade.

They may well do. The free software movement's founders may speak
softly, but they carry a big stick.

And it's a stick that IBM and Novell have learnt packs quite a
punch.
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